Design with Perfect Sense: the Adoption of Smart Sensor Technologies (SST) in Architectural Practice

Recent development in the Internet of Things (IoT) has enabled real-time data-driven decision making in diverse industries. For example, over the last few years, the introduction of smart sensor technologies such as Watson IoT has led to various data-driven solutions in space planning, real-estate management, and energy conservation. Despite the recent development, these technologies are not widely used in architectural practice. In the wake of this trend, this research aims at understanding how architects and design professionals can be supported to further utilize smart sensor technologies in their practice. Based on the Technology-Organization-Environment framework and a series of interviews, the major influencing factors on user adoption were identified. This study contributes to both theory and practice by identifying six contributing factors, namely perceived risk and value, commitment to learn and collaborate, as well as knowledge and trust

Virtual Reality Applications and Experiential Learning Needs: The Needs-Affordances-Features Perspective

A four-year college degree is no longer required by many employers. Instead, employers are seeking candidates who are able to solve problems creatively and think outside the box fearlessly. As a result, educators take a fresh look at new learning technologies to meet this demand outside the formal education systems. Among different education technologies, immersion learning technologies have received special attention in recent years. According to Dale’s Learning Cone, the level of engagement offered and maintained by these tools is critical to learning outcomes. Virtual Reality (VR) applications provide more engaging and purposeful learning experiences than other any other multimedia-rich tools. However, to bring more benefit than harm, those tools must be designed appropriately and effectively. Hence, we introduce a framework to understand and design educational VR applications. Our framework offers a new perspective on modeling the relationships between VR features, key affordances enabled by those features, and experiential learning needs met by the identified affordances. First, we studied how VR advance learning processes by analyzing five commonly used VR applications in K-12. Our research was focused on VR use-cases in alternative STEM education. Then, we identified the key features of these programs. We grouped the features based on three main use-cases that are typical in the evaluation of learning platforms–content creation, content delivery (instruction), and learning assessment. We also investigated the features available to students and teachers. Having analyzed the list of features from the Needs-Affordances-Features perspective, we derived a list of affordances satisfied by those features – individually or collectively. We refined this list after evaluating how teachers and students utilized features and as a result, identified five categories of VR affordances: knowledge co-creation, knowledge exchange, knowledge integration, knowledge application, and knowledge assessment. Lastly, we examined how these affordances satisfy five groups of higher-order experiential learning needs in VR environment including sensory experience (know-where), temporal experience (know-when), interactional experience (know-who), cognitive experience (know-what), behavioral experience (know-how), and metacognitive/emotional experience (know-why). This framework serves several purposes. First and foremost, our framework offers VR developers a simple guide on how to understand students’ experiential learning needs and enhance the technology design to address those needs. For example, VR developers can model how students and teachers would react to different affordances before planning the features. This can potentially reduce the number of design iterations and maximize the chance of product success. Likewise, after development, this framework can inform the evaluation of VR applications including user test plans. Educators are the second group who benefits from this new framework in many ways. By using this framework, educators can first decide whether using a VR application is the right decision, and if so, how to choose the right program that suits their students’ experiential learning needs. Lastly, researchers in both education and technology fields, can adopt, test, and expand our framework to describe and understand the role of VR technology in enhancing students’ learning experience and outcome. Ideally, adoption of this framework would result in a better understanding of VR design and applications more systematically and holistically that would benefit alternative models of education as well as inform the VR application in other fields

Screen Time and Productivity: An Extension of Goal-setting Theory to Explain Optimum Smartphone Use

Over the past several years, much research has examined the negative consequences that can arise from smartphone use. To help reduce these consequences, companies have developed smartphone applications and features to enable self-monitoring behaviors. However, the mechanisms that have caused smartphone-enabled self-monitoring behaviors to emerge and the positive outcomes that might result from such behaviors have received limited scholarly attention. In this study, we ameliorate this gap by proposing a framework that highlights key antecedents and outcomes of screen- time self-monitoring success based on a smartphone-based self-monitoring intervention. Informed by a short-term longitudinal study, our results show how smartphone-based self-monitoring can enhance awareness of smartphone use and, consequently, lead to positive outcomes for users. Our findings reveal that how users perceive smartphone self- monitoring affordances, their outcome expectations, and their smartphone self-monitoring efficacy positively relate to the extent they engage in smartphone-based self-monitoring behavior. In turn, self-monitoring enhances user productivity and leads to an overall sense of contentment with achievement. Nevertheless, our findings suggest that self-monitoring fatigue negatively moderates these relationships. This study offers novel theoretical and practical insights to encourage users to use smartphones in a more regulated manner. More generally, this study contributes to the literature on self-monitoring and self-regulation in digitally enabled environments

Organizational Mindfulness in the Digital Economy and Its Impact on Productivity

With the rise of digital workplaces amidst the abrupt transition during the COVID-19 pandemic, many organizations have been transformed structurally and operationally. Throughout this transformation, these organizations realized that employees’ productivity was negatively affected due to several technology-related reasons such as technostress as well as personal challenges such as lack of self-regulation skills. As individuals and teams were coping with and adjusting to these changes, these organizations implemented different initiatives and mechanisms to maintain productivity. Encouraging mindfulness practices was among these solutions. While some employees positively responded to mindfulness practices, managers and team leaders were skeptical about the practicality of these practices. The impact of these practices is thus a matter of debate among both scholars and practitioners due to their inconclusive outcomes. This study is to review the current evidence over this debate, explain the relationship between mindfulness and productivity and inform future development of mindfulness-based interventions. The concept of digital mindfulness in work settings has gained attention in recent years as its effects on employees have been linked to reduced stress and increased focus. In this study, digital mindfulness is defined as the psychological state of behavioral awareness and engaged focus on the present task to improve technological outcomes including innovative use of technology. Digital mindfulness can be the crucial step needed in optimal decision-making within organizational groups. Prior studies claimed that through mindfulness practices, employees’ alertness and attention to context can result in better usage of digital technologies through both individual tasks and group efforts (Abhari et al. 2021; Klase et al. 2022; Li et al. 2021; Shahbaz and Parker 2021). These studies documented the benefits of mindfulness to effective technology use. For example, team leaders who use mindful interventions demonstrated increased alertness to issues in virtual environments and exhibited productive use of resources in digital transformations. Our study, however, revealed that there was a commonality among the successful intervention; digital mindfulness could positively affect productivity when implemented at an organizational level. We characterize organizational digital mindfulness as an organization’s willingness to take the necessary steps not only in encouraging digital mindfulness among all employees but also in reflecting on past group experiences, uncovering new ways to utilize technology, and openness to use technology in new ways. We observed that the effective adoption and use of mindfulness practices are typically top-down, stemming from organizational leadership and embedded in the organizational values and culture. Our study revealed that organizational digital mindfulness when promoted and encouraged by the organization leadership and practiced by management teams, directly contributes to not only team productivity but also to digital innovation. For example, digital mindfulness from organizational leaders involves awareness and scrutiny of group cognitive biases—for example, groupthink and bandwagon that have hindering effects on digital innovation—if remain unnoticed. Organizational leaders who are mindful must also be sensitive to work processes that can provide context to new digital solutions. Similarly, mindfulness implemented by leaders within organizations allows employees the framework to examine the consequences of outcomes and remain skeptical of current procedures to uncover possible improvements. In short, this study characterizes organizational digital mindfulness as an organization-wide strategy promoted and practiced by leaders, embedded in work practices, and routinized by digital transformation. We argue only when digital mindfulness is formally institutionalized and practiced at all organizational levels, it can lead to meaningful, productive, and innovative use of technology. Our preliminary findings can pave the way for a broader understanding of digital mindfulness strategies and their practicality in not only maintaining productivity in digital environments but also creating values using digital technology

Reciprocal Relationship between Employee Experience Management and Digital Transformation

Employees are the implementers and immediate beneficiaries of almost all digital transformation (DT) initiative. Employees are in the first line of executing these initiatives, from redefining business strategies and organizational structure to transforming internal processes and external services. Hence, employees’ experiences with DT initiatives should be understood, invested in, and managed foremost at both strategic and tactical levels. Without such attention, DT initiatives would fail to fulfill their promises or even cause more harm than benefit. We argue that DT initiatives can be a source of positive employee experiences if they can address the employees’ experiential desires in support of DT. Managing employee experience by the mean of digital tools and technologies can be achieved through several strategies. In this presentation, we discuss five strategies that can be adopted by different organizations regardless of their size or industry. We believe the implementation of these digitally enabled strategies has the potential to facilitate DT and encourage employees\u27 participation across their organizations. First, organizations can employ the use of enterprise social networks (ESN) to connect employees across functional units, promote their achievements, brand internally, and boost intradepartmental collaboration. The introduction of ESN as part of DT initiatives may encourage employees to experience the value of digital tools in an organic and personalized way before committing to formally use the new tools. ESNs can be also implemented to create internal learning networks to support employees with the applications of new tools and implementation of new processes. Moreover, ESNs can encourage employees to share their preferences and needs before the management teams decide about implementing new digital strategies, adopting new processes, or utilizing new technologies. ESNs also encourage employees to participate in evaluating DT initiatives and provide honest feedback throughout the implementation process. Second, DT initiatives can open up the R&D process to all employees. Digital tools allow employees to co-create the future of their organization by participating in the innovation process. Likewise, DT can directly connect employees who are interested in new product or service development to the customer base to learn about their expectations and concerns. DT initiatives that mobilize employees to innovate have a higher chance of success as the employees creatively utilize new tools and processes to address the inevitable challenges that organizations face during DT. Third, DT initiatives can democratize the access to and use of organizational data. Using digital platforms to make data available and accessible across organizations may enhance employee experience by promoting not only transparency but also trust in DT initiatives. Widely available business intelligence tools to employees can help them make informed decisions around DT related topics such as talent management, job crafting, training, sourcing, and so on. Fourth, DT can enhance how organizations train their employees in order to prepare them for upcoming changes. Using digital tools to enhance employees’ knowledge and skills not only supports employees in adopting new tools and processes but also establish trust and confidence among them in actively using and benefiting from DT initiatives. Lastly, DT initiatives can support employee empowerment programs. DT initiatives can grant employees autonomy to craft their work process and power to make autonomous decisions. This sense of empowerment may lead to an increase in employee job satisfaction as well as motivation to participate in DT initiatives. The proposed strategies can help employees take ownership of DT plans as well as their results, which is crucial to the success of DT initiatives. Therefore, understanding and acting upon the reciprocal relationship between Employee Experience Management programs and using digital technologies–for example for networking, ideation, knowledge-management, training, and empowerment–is a promising approach to facilitate achieve DT promises such as enhanced collaboration, innovation, and productivity

The Future of Social Learning: A Connectivist Approach to Using Social Technologies for Inclusive and Socially Responsible Education

The goal of this paper is to propose an integrated strategies for improving inclusive and socially responsible education. The strategies draw from connectivism approach and set a foundation for transforming social learning using social technologie

The Limits of Open Innovation: A Case Study of a Social Product Development Platform

Proponents of open innovation have long argued that essential resources for sustained innovation lie beyond an organization’s boundaries with its customers and value chain partners and that organizations must work collaboratively with internal and external stakeholders to build creative solutions. Unlike the traditional internal Research and Development model, open innovation practices are implemented differently (e.g., crowdsourcing, innovation marketplace, user innovation, and open-source community). Previous studies have articulated the general logic of these models, described the workings of some well-known examples, and examined the logic of engaging external actors in new product development. While open innovation can potentially facilitate and enhance the innovation process and outcomes, the downside and the limits of this openness remain understudied. Further research on the limitations of open innovation is more needed than ever since in the last few years many companies closed down their customer innovation communities, open innovation marketplaces were abandoned, and innovation intermediaries filed for bankruptcies. Open innovation can fade due to many reasons. Open innovation models such as crowdsourcing and innovation marketplace usually hold tight control over the innovation process and activities that require external actors. These platforms still set structurally defined requirements and standard procedures for the actors to ideate based upon. Meanwhile, they often predefine the innovation scope with narrowly defined tasks for the innovative actors to complete. With the sponsors’ tight control, external actors often cannot freely ideate and become motivated to deliver a creative solution. Even with incentives, the traditional open innovation models sometimes cannot reach the most effective innovation results. For example, the cost of implementing and running open innovation model sometimes does not justify its benefits. Research also showed that open innovation does not necessarily reduce the risk or failure rate of new products. Unpredictability in the innovation results and uncertainty in the environment, including sociotechnical factors, can also become a part of why open innovation fails. Hence, it is crucial to understand the open innovation process and its interplay with success or failure in new product or service development. In this study, we used the case of Social Product Development (SPD) as an open innovation model to investigate and document the limitations of open innovation in consumer product development. The SPD model encompasses many key and common features of open innovation models while being more dynamic and less restrictive. The SPD model also has a high failure rate. Examining the SPD process model thus helped us identify the limitations in the open innovation with some generalizability to other open innovation models. We first identified key activities in the SPD model, including social engagement, ideation, experiential communication, social validation, co-development, and co-commercialization, at three different levels: innovation activities, innovation projects, and innovation community. Then we examined when and how the identified activities at each level may fail to deliver the expected outcomes. We categorized the results (open innovation failure factors) into three phases associated with invention initiation, development, and commercialization. For each group, we identified contributing groups namely Innovation sponsor, innovation partners, and problem-solver. Lastly, we proposed a 3 by 3 activity-phase matrix that includes open innovation success/failure factors such as technology affordances, reward systems, mass-screening, community culture, collaboration support, social validation, social selling, osmotic communication, manufacturing agility, and intellectual property right. For each group, we also identified the responsible actors namely innovation sponsors, innovation partners, and problem-solver. Our findings provide a richer picture of SPD failure factors that holds relevance for the design of open innovation platforms. Our results also provide practical recommendations on open innovation platform governance including rules and policies concerning reward systems, partnerships, and manufacturing